Upgrading our Website Appeal

Please make a donation to support this project now!

Please help us to substantially upgrade and improve our Website, making it a leading source of information about the Caledonian Forest.

Just as a spider needs to renew its web, such as this one in Glen Affric, with your help now we'll make vital improvements to our site on the World Wide Web.

Dear Supporter

At Trees for Life our central focus is on practical work for the restoration of the Caledonian Forest in the Highlands. Over the years, however, as our project has grown, another aspect has also become important - the positive example and inspiration which we provide to many people, both throughout Scotland and in many other countries around the world. A key element in this has been the development of our site on the World Wide Web, and we've received many commendations for its quality, and for the extent of the information it contains.

We're now ready to significantly expand and upgrade our Website, and I'm writing today to invite you to support us in this: to help make it a comprehensive information resource about the Caledonian Forest and our work, and a more effective tool for raising funds for our project.

Our Website is vital to the future development of Trees for Life

The work of ecological restoration is quite literally that of re-weaving the strands in the web of life, and is essential for the creation of a truly sustainable future for humans and all other species in Scotland. So too is our Website crucial to the future development of our work, and our goal is to develop it into the definitive site on the Web about the Caledonian Forest. Our site provides a vital information link to our members and supporters, and I see it becoming a widely-used resource, as ecological restoration becomes a globally-important activity in the years ahead. The experience we're gaining in helping to restore the Caledonian Forest will be of increasing value to similar projects elsewhere, and the Web is the most effective way to make this available in a universally-accessible way.

Our web site also already acts as a source of volunteers for our Conservation Holidays, and of funds for our work through the online ordering facility. However, this section of the site is urgently in need of upgrading, to bring it to a professional standard, and to make it more user-friendly.

Please help us to substantially upgrade our Website!

Thanks to the generosity of Peter Riding, a professional Web designer and a life member of Trees for Life who has been donating his time and services to us, we have regularly been adding new material to our site. Peter has kindly offered to continue with this for the next 6 months, and together we have been developing a plan for a major expansion and enhancements to the site.

However, to accomplish this we need to raise £4,500 for the additional costs involved, so I'm inviting you to add your commitment to ours and that of Peter, by sending a donation now.

Here is what your support will help us to achieve

Map of Trees for Life's target area

• We'll upgrade our existing secure ordering facility, which enables people to book Conservation Holidays, order dedicated tree certificates and make donations online, to a professional standard. This will include a shopping basket feature, automatic email confirmation of donations/orders and a simplified order form, which will make it easier for people to use.

• We'll add a map of our target area for forest restoration as a new, central feature of our Website.

  This will feature clickable links to further pages for each of the sites we work at (shown in purple on the map here), with these pages containing extensive details and photographs of each location, and the practical work we've carried out there. These pages will, in turn, have links to enable people to book Conservation Holidays at each of the sites.

• We will add substantial amounts of new material to the Caledonian Forest Information Centre section of our site, as part of our goal to make it the most comprehensive information source about the Caledonian Forest on the Web. This new material will include the proceedings of the special seminar about aspen in the Highlands, which was held in May 2001. We will also significantly expand and redesign the links section of our site.

To achieve all this, we need to raise £4,500 to cover the costs of purchasing new software, setting up the shopping basket facility, producing new maps and other graphic material, and writing the extensive new text for the site.

We need your help for this project to proceed!

This project can only proceed when we've raised the money for it, and we need to do this soon, to take advantage of Peter Riding's offer of donating his time and services. With your help, our Website will become a leading online source of information about the Caledonian Forest, and a vital link to our supporters and members, so please become part of this exciting project by sending a donation, of whatever size, today.

To make a donation online to this project, please go to our order form, and thank you in advance for whatever contribution you can give - your support will help to make all the difference.

Yours sincerely,

Alan Watson Featherstone
Executive Director

P.S. We're ready to move ahead with this project immediately, so please send any donation which you can make straight away. Thank you!

If you would like to make a donation for a different aspect of our work, please see our Appeals for Funds.

Published: April 2002
Last updated: 25 August 2010